Academic contacts of the authors:
Topalovic Ana | Mendel University - Brno (CZ) :
Villa Marco | University of Bergamo - Bergamo (IT) :

Motivation

Due to the trend of world and European integration processes and many agreements concluded in the last few decades (for example, the European Single Market, founded in 1993, which also includes the free movement of persons within the EU member state), the migration trend in EU countries has been growing rapidly since the early 1990s. Varying from country to country, in some Member States the number of migrants has increased several times in the mentioned period. But which European Union countries are most susceptible to this trend? What is it that attracts migrants to certain countries and what is it that rejects them from others? And finally, what is the structure of the population that leaves and immigrates to certain countries and what are differences between them?
We decided to start our analysis with these questions in mind, firstly looking for a possible relationship between the characteristics of countries and the 2019 data on immigration and emigration.

Code and datasets behind our plots

The code will not be printed in this html file. To see it, please contact the authors for a full access to the RMarkDown file. For our analysis, we integrated togheter several open-access datasets provided by Eurostat: migr_imm5prv, migr_emi3nxt, tec00114, nama_10_gdp and migr_pop1ctz. See the RMarkDown file for further details.

Plots and comments

Plot 1


The first plot attempts to explain the relationship between the number of emigrants (X axis) and the number of immigrants (Y axis) and to examine whether they depend on the economic development of the country. We took the stock value of immigration and emigration referred to 2019. The size of the bubble represents the population size of a country and the color represents the size of the Gross Domestic Product, as one of the most important indicators for economic activity. On the left side of the plot, GDP for 2019 is measured per capita in Purchasing Power Standards (PPS) to eliminate the differences in price levels between countries and allowing to compare the volume of GDP within the EU Member States. On the right side of the plot, GDP is measured in current prices, million euro, to examine the relationship between population size of a country and total volume of GDP. In both cases, Luxembourg and Ireland were excluded due to their outstanding achievements in terms of GDP, preventing distortion of the result of other countries.
It is obvious from plot that both the number of emigrants and the number of immigrants are highly correlated with the population size of the country as well as that numbers of emigrants and numbers of immigrants are correlated between themselves. Further the total volume of GDP seems mainly correlated to the population size. On the other hand, the left side of the plot tells us that GDP per capita (more relevant for comparing countries) is not so correlated with respect to the number of migrants. This can be clearly seen in the example of Spain, which, despite its below-average GDP per capita, has a fairly large number of immigrants, even in relation to the number of emigrants.
Finally, we noticed that ll the most populated countries faced more immigration than emigration, and this is true for the most of EU countries. Of course, there are still some exceptions, like Romania (202.000k immigrants vs 233.000k emigrants).

Plot 1: Relationship between the total number of emigrants and immigrants and the population size
(stock value from 2019 - Integrated datasets of multiple eurostat sources)



Plot 2


The second and third plot show the structure of immigrants and emigrants according to gender and age group. For this purpose, two countries with similar characteristics pronounced in the previous plot (United Kingdom and Spain) were selected. We decided to keep UK, since at the end of 2019 the country was still part of EU and it was still sharing the benefits of a strenghter bilateral agreement on migration with other EU member states. In the second plot, bars stand for the total percentage of immigrants to UK and Spain for both genders separately. The Y axis represents percentages of each age group in the total number of immigrants. We grouped our classes taking into account the motivation that a person will encounter in its decision of leaving/reaching a country, that can be related differently to studying, working, or retiring purposes. Again, the stock values for 2019 were used.
Although both selected countries are characterized by similar values of population size, GDP per capita and numbers of immigrants and emigrants, the structure of immigrants in these countries are far from similar. In the UK, the highest percentage (more than 60%) of immigrants of both genders belong to the age group of 20 to 34. This age group represents only around 40% in Spain. In general, all age groups appear to be much more evenly distributed in Spain than in the UK. It is also important to note that immigrants to Spain in the age group 50 or older make up a not so negligible percentage as in the case of the UK (below 5% for both genders).

Plot 2: Structure of immigrants to UK and Spain according to age groups for both genders
(stock value from 2019 - Integrated datasets of multiple eurostat sources)



Plot 3


The third plot shows the same information but for the structure of emigrants. From this plot it can be noticed that the differences in the structure of emigrants for these two countries are similar to those for immigrants. What is noteworthy in this case, that differs from the previous plot, is that much lower percentage of the population in the age group 19 or younger leaves the UK than Spain.

Plot 3: Structure of emigrants from UK and Spain according to age groups for both genders
(stock value from 2019 - Integrated datasets of multiple eurostat sources)



Conclusion and next steps

We saw that migration in the EU are not so correlated to the economic development of the country as on its population size. We could also note that countries characterized by the high number of immigrants are also characterized by the high number of emigrants, which might seem surprising, given that it can be expected that what attracts migrants to a particular country also affects the inhabitants of that country not to be motivated to emigrate. The question arises, what are the main reasons for migrants to choose a particular country to immigrate to.
Further topic for research that occurred is what is it that attracts and rejects different age groups to and from certain countries. We guessed if those differences goes beyond generically speaking better opportunities. In this sense, we thought also to cultural and religious similarities between countries, common languages, and government relationships in general. Questions that are still open in our mind and in the future could be investigated through dynamic flows related to migrations.